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A BAD, BAD THING

Forbes (Jigsaw Man, 2015, etc.) offers a sharp puzzle as well as a brisk look at the colorful world of racing before getting...

DCI Eve West’s murky past threatens what should be a bright future.

During all the years Eve rose steadily through the ranks of London’s homicide squad, territory usually reserved for male officers, she kept at bay the personal demons that robbed her of sleep and kept secret her string of forbidden affairs with subordinates. But her career threatens to go pear-shaped when she and DS Jason Scott are ambushed during a stakeout. Not only is Scott her latest lover, but his death disrupts a nearly completed undercover operation by the Met’s drug team. Eve fears she’s done for until a ray of hope emerges from an unexpected quarter. John Duran, a coldblooded killer Eve locked up years ago, reaches out to her from Bellevue Prison, offering to trade evidence that could exonerate her for her help. Duran wants Eve to team up with Dan Cooper, a journalist who runs a seat-of-the pants operation called 4Justice, to reinvestigate the 10-year-old murder of Jane McNeil, a young horsewoman who worked for the late Tim Michaels at Westerby Racing. Duran claims he’s only interested in justice for fellow inmate Sean Farrell, who was convicted of Jane’s murder. Eve questions both Duran’s motives and Cooper’s capabilities, but pursuing this inquiry seems the only possibility of salvaging her career. As she sets up housekeeping at the Westerby compound, she learns more than she wants about the intense world of horse racing and about the rich, mercurial Michaels clan, which includes Eve’s first ever lover, Gavin Challis, now an MP married to Tim’s daughter, Melissa Michaels. Will Eve’s inquiry free her to move forward or plunge her back into a past she’s struggled to forget?

Forbes (Jigsaw Man, 2015, etc.) offers a sharp puzzle as well as a brisk look at the colorful world of racing before getting bogged down in a needlessly complex solution.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-7278-8832-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Severn House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018

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BADLANDS

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...

Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.

Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.

Pub Date: July 28, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015

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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.

Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.

Pub Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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